I will tend to agree with much of the sentiment expressed here. But still reserving judgement on whether to completely get rid of the downvote. I think the platform should take a long serious look at this and maybe do a bit of research into other ways to penalize or discourage posting and conduct that currently may truly warrant a downvote.

It turns out also that downvoting has not proven too successful at curbing some of the abuse where it would have legitimate uses for. Limiting posts seems to be almost something to look into even if downvoting was retained.

And downvoting could also be programmed to use some ratio of the same amount of power of an upvote, so that negativite penalty does not carry the same weight as positive reinforcement.